New device treats major depression

JAMES CITY — Riverside Health System has a new weapon to combat depression.

The NeuroStar transcranial magnetic stimulation device arrived in November and is designed to treat patients when other forms of treatment don't work, said Philip Schlobohm, a psychiatrist and executive medical director of the Riverside Behavioral Health Center.

Major depression — depression severe enough to interfere with a person's ability to work, sleep, eat and enjoy once-pleasurable activities — every year affects about 14.8 million American adults, or about 6.7 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. It's more prevalent in women than in men.

"Only half of them are really treated, and half of them don't respond to antidepressants," Schlobohm said.

The noninvasive treatment is being offered at the Riverside Healthcare Center Williamsburg at 120 Kings Way in James City County. It's also available at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, where it's used to treat depression along with obsessive compulsive disorders, dementia, auditory hallucinations and post-traumatic stress disorder.

During treatment, a device is placed over the patient's scalp. It sends out a highly focused pulsed magnetic field, similar in type and strength to magnetic fields produced by a magnetic resonance imaging ( MRI) machine, to stimulate nerve cells in the area of the brain thought to control mood, according to Neurostartms.com. It was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about two years ago, Schlobohm said.

In studies, roughly two out of every six patients treated with the device respond to treatment. Two begin to respond to antidepressants, and two don't respond to treatment, Schlobohm said.

Treatment lasts for about 37 minutes, five days a week for about five weeks. It was recently granted a billing code so that it can be reimbursed by insurance, Schlobohm said. It costs $6,000 to $8,000.

"What's nice is no side effects," he said.

Antidepressant medications come with a slew of possible side effects, including nausea, increased appetite and weight gain, loss of sexual desire and other sexual problems, fatigue and drowsiness, insomnia, dry mouth, blurred vision, constipation, dizziness, agitation, irritability and anxiety. And electroconvulsive therapy, in which electric currents are passed through the brain, bring a potential side effect of memory loss, Schlobohm said.

He remembers hearing about magnetic treatments for the first time about 12 years ago at a conference.

"They actually all laughed, and one said, 'Yeah, like Star Trek,'" Schlobohm recalled. "At this point, nothing negative is being said about it. They're seeing the positive effects."

Find more health news at dailypress.com/healthnotes, facebook.com/dphealth and twitter.com/veronicachufo.